Lula and the Future of the Past

In 2012, John French and Alexandre Fortes wrote in the pages of this journal about Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff, and the legacies and challenges of Brazil's Workers' Party (PT).¹ Writing from a moment in which many imagined the future of the left emerging from the "country of the future," French and Fortes reiterated the sentiment that we were living then "not only in an epoch of changes but in a change of epochs," in which the historical roadmaps of the past did not hold sway.² In such a context, for those wishing to understand PT governance, one salient question involved the ways in which the Lula government had broken with the past (11), and one compelling answer evoked Stephane Monclaire's notion that "political life is not above or beyond the day-to-day" (22).

Those ruminations have acquired contorted significance in the tumultuous near-decade since they were written. Fortes and French saw many storm clouds on the horizon even in 2012; the endurance of corruption and "physiological" interest politics, looming economic challenges, accelerating social demands, and the difficulties of integrating the contradictory, patchwork left of the PT without Lula's unparalleled political savvy. Yet virtually no one foresaw how those difficulties would be amplified and subsumed in a calamitous storm of dirty politics and economic collapse that ripped President Rousseff from power in 2016 and eventually upended the democratizing process that had shaped Brazil's political teleologies for more than three decades. Brazil's 2010s certainly marked a change of epochs for which we lack effective language, and the notion that political life is woven in the day-to-day has never seemed more apt. But the path thus charted is so radically different from that projected by Lula that the question of whether or not he broke from the Brazilian past takes on new significance. Is what we are seeing a fiercely reactionary blowback to radical transformation? Is it instead a violent stirring of deep currents of Brazilian conservatism, which the PT was not radical enough to eradicate? Or is it these things and also something more, a transformation in the very fabric of Brazil's "day-to-day" that ultimately drained vitality and resonance from a democratic and institutionalist vision of the future that was irrevocably entwined with Lula's own triumphant past?

John French's Lula and His Politics of Cunning deserves to be read on its own terms, as a landmark biography of a pivotal political figure, grounded in French's four decades of intense scholarly and personal engagement with the industrial world that shaped Lula and the PT. Yet as I followed French's deeply researched account of Lula's riveting life story, and especially as I pondered the mid-twentieth-century decades that French brings to life with especially forceful detail, I could not help but wonder: How much of Lula's dynamism was based on his embodiment of a projected future that, for many people, was fragmenting and dissolving below the surface even in the halcyon days of Lula's presidency? And might we find in that dissonance some explanation of Brazil's recent unraveling?

Many of French's most finely rendered arguments are rooted in his vivid depiction of the electric energy of mid-twentieth-century São Paulo as it was experienced by a generation of young migrant men who lassoed their fates to the city's heady developmentalist ambitions.³ Lula and his family were part of Brazil's own Great Migration, a massive, racialized, generational move from the Northeast to the Southeast, from the countryside to the city, from the patriarchal logic of a slave past to the hybrid dialectics of Brazilian modernity. After a harrowing journey from rural Pernambuco in the tracks of an abusive husband and father who had already established a second family in the port city of Santos, Lula (along with his mother and siblings) eventually moved to São Paulo with virtually nothing in the mid-1950s. According to French, they

entered a world where nothing was rooted or grounded, an urban...